Oh, NO! Please say it isn’t so!

Sunday morning I made my usual visit to Charlotte’s web only to find it spider-less. The web had not been re-spun from the previous day: still the same old design and looking a bit tattered. Not her usual neat web. I looked around but could not see her hiding in the foliage surrounding the web.

Mid-morning after our trip in to the farmer’s market in Warwick I checked again. Still no big yellow-and-black Charlotte.

It was depressing to find her web abandoned. Almost as if I had lost a friend.

I figured she had moved on to better catching grounds since I had not seen her with a kill for some days now.

Fast forward to the afternoon.

Rick got in the pool first, and while standing in the shallow end he remarked that there was a critter crawling on the bottom. I told him to just scoop it up with his hands, but being the big brave man that he is, he refused. I told him that if it was on the bottom it was surely dead.  There was nothing for it but for me to get the skimmer.

I put the skimmer in the water and captured whatever it was in the net and brought it to the surface.

Oh no. It was my Charlotte. I could not believe it. Tears threatened to collect in the corners of my eyes. I yelled to Rick “It’s Charlotte!” and at first he did not believe me. When he saw how upset I was he knew that I was not just kidding him.

Poor Charlotte. I felt horrible. Was I somehow responsible for her death?  You see, we did sleep out for a few hours on the air mattress in the cabana and did not cover up the pool until much later than we usually do. Was she in a habit of wandering away from her web in the middle of the night?

What made her leave her cozy web? Did she commit spider suicide? Or did she unwittingly fall into her watery grave? 

Just two days ago I had taken her photo yet again. Here she is in all her worldly spider glory.

At least I know what happened to her, but I think it would have been better if I could imagine her off spinning a new web somewhere.

I’ll miss you Charlotte!